James J Dempsey

What I do

I'm currently CTO at FYItag, an early
stage startup working on tools for Social Media Marketing.

Before FYItag, I worked at Comverse in the
Comverse Media Server group. I was with Comverse ever since they bought
InTouch Systems, a small startup
in Cambridge, MA. When I joined InTouch in Feb 1997, there were only
six employees. While at Comverse, I worked on Tel@GO, a
voice-activated telephone assistant; the Comverse Media Server, a
high performance, standards-compliant telco-grade VoiceXML media
server; the Network Address Book, Java-based SyncML server; and IVE, a
graphical programming environment built in Java for developing
VoiceXML applications.

Before InTouch, I worked at
Bolt Beranek & Newman
for sixteen years. I had a great time there and still have friends at BBN. In the time that I was there, I worked on
many things. My wife Heidi also works at BBN, managing
development in the QoS Services and VPN groups.

BBN was purchased by GTE, GTE merged with Bell Atlantic to form
Verizon. Verizon spun off the former BBN Planet (a.k.a GTE Internetworking)
to form Genuity and kept the
former BBN S&T as BBN
Technologies. Later, BBN was repurchased from Verizon by a
private group of investors and is now, once again, an independent company.

Random Other Stuff

I am the author of xrsh, a tool for launching X11 clients on remote machines. Xrsh takes care of all the bookeeping of setting the remote $DISPLAY and handing authentication. It can be downloaded as a shar file here.

If you are interested in Lisp, or computer languages in general, take a look at why "Worse is Better"
.

If you are thinking of buying a computer, then I'm sure you want to know the
myriad reasons why a
Macintosh is better
.

If you need a map to all of Apple's web sites, check out
this one
from Guy Kawasaki.

My dear friend Susan Bernstein left BBN after 16
years to become an independent consultant. Here are some pictures from her going away party. Here is
a collage of pictures we took for her party.

Susan Bernstein and I held a "Good luck" party for
Larry Denenberg who left BBN after 12 years to join
the startup InTouch Systems. Here are some pictures.

What could be more random than Random Hall. Check out the web page for my old dorm at MIT.